Install Sguil on Fedora/RHEL/CentOS using NSMnow

I've written about NSMnow a few times before and I'm a big fan. They already had at least partial support for Fedora and I suggested to the developers some changes that would allow them to also support RHEL/CentOS. The SecurixLive team has done an amazing job with NSMnow (and Barnyard2) and things just keep getting better!

You can read more at the SecurixLive site:
Install Sguil on Fedora/RHEL/CentOS using NSMnow

Upgrading from Fedora 9 to Fedora 10 using Preupgrade

A few months ago, I upgraded from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9 using Preupgrade. Last night, I decided it was time to upgrade to Fedora 10 (F10), so I went the Preupgrade route again.

I did a yum update and then launched preupgrade. It downloaded all the necessary F10 RPMs and said it was ready for reboot. I rebooted into the installer and was greeted with an error message saying it couldn't find the RPM repository. I surmised that the installer hadn't mounted my /var partition (Preupgrade creates a local RPM repository at /var/cache/yum/preupgrade/). I did some searching and found Bugzilla bug 473782, which describes this exact problem. The fix was to reboot back into Fedora 9 and install Preupgrade 1.0.1-1 from the testing repository with the following command:

yum --enablerepo=updates-testing-newkey update preupgrade

I then launched Preupgrade again, rebooted into the installer, and successfully upgraded from Fedora 9 to Fedora 10. I rebooted into Fedora 10 and did a full yum update. I then noticed that I couldn't SSH into this Fedora 10 machine using SSH keys anymore. I did some more searching and found Bugzilla bug 473014. It seems that the upgrade process changes the SELinux security context on the user .ssh directories. The fix is to run the following command as root:

restorecon -r /home/*/.ssh

Haven't seen any other problems so far.

Upgrading from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9 using Preupgrade

In the past, I've upgraded to the latest Fedora version by using the unsupported "yum upgrade". This is potentially dangerous, but it always worked for me. When I read in Red Hat Magazine that Fedora had a new tool to do in-place upgrades, I was excited to try it out.

I tried out Preupgrade on a few Fedora 8 virtual machines and everything went smoothly. Preupgrade had earned my confidence, so I proceeded to "yum -y update && yum -y install preupgrade && preupgrade" on my main Fedora 8 desktop. It downloaded all the RPMs and rebooted into the installer. It upgraded the system and said it was ready for the final reboot. So I rebooted the machine and was greeted by a blinking GRUB prompt. Somehow, GRUB had lost its configuration and could no longer boot my Fedora installation. Doh!

I've never really played around in the GRUB shell, so I never realized how powerful and versatile it is. All I had to do was the following (the {tab} indicates to use the Tab key for filename completion):

kernel (hd0,2)/vmlinuz{tab} root=/dev/sda5
initrd (hd0,2)/initrd{tab}
boot

The system came up and I then did the following to re-write GRUB into the MBR:

grub-install /dev/sda

And we have a working Fedora 9 installation!